Watching in astonishment on Sunday evening as Craig Kieswetter and Kevin Pietersen calmed every England supporter's frazzled nerves with their brutal assault on Australia's World Twenty20 attack, I was struck by the purring approval of the commentator, Ian Chappell. Not for the batsmen so much, though he did pay credit to their innovation and power, but for the tools they were using to tackle the job and leave Shane Watson, in particular, looking bemused. "Gee," he said on more than one occasion, "he must have a good bat. That's some good English willow out there."

His comments conjured up memories of my own relationship with bats, of summers spent saving up for one and the evenings devoted to the little rituals of looking after it, with several grades of sandpaper deployed painstakingly to achieve a creamy finish before treating it with linseed oil. This always had to be undertaken outdoors because received wisdom back then maintained that the oil-soaked rags were prone to spontaneous combustion, a price too steep even for my indulgent parents.

The bats we used at school and in the club's indoor nets in the mid-70s were as ancient as some of our teachers. Too old for gaudy stickers, they had the maker's name stencilled on them in black, usually with the autograph of some long-forgotten player, and the ones at the bottom of the bag had their cracks held together by glue and twine wrapped around the face. Some were covered in plastic sheaths that may have prolonged their life, but rendered them as meat-free as George Bernard Shaw's diet. When one innings was ended even more prematurely than normal with me left holding the handle and splice as the detached blade disappeared over extra cover, I resolved that the time had come to get a bat of my own.

But deciding what to buy was far from straightforward. As someone who obsessed about arcane details, each maker had some sort of connotation. Gray-Nicolls, with their scoops, were the preserve of the wristy, whippy stylists; Stuart Surridge Jumbos the clubbers and dynamic hitters; Hunts County the purists; Mitre the nurdlers.

Within a 10-mile radius of our house we had three batmakers: Slazenger, Crown Sports and Saint Peter, the latter enjoying a brief spell in the sun thanks to its sponsorship of Tony Greig during his shouty pomp and his use of its absurd boxing-style batting gloves. You could go to the factories and purchase a "second" quite reasonably, but I was determined not to compromise.

That meant a trip to the shop run by the former Yorkshire captain, Billy Sutcliffe, son of Herbert, in one of the Victorian arcades in Leeds. The place was so well-stocked with bats that one of the hazards of working there must have been buffoons ostentatiously farting in the cricket department just so they could drolly let rip with the "wind in the willows" gag.

There, solely because of Ian Botham's endorsement, I bought a Duncan Fearnley and was also persuaded to invest in a bat mallet, presumably the cricket equipment retailer's equivalent of Clark's trying to flog you shoe trees. After hours spent knocking it in, the bat became a constant companion. I never got to the stage of Geoffrey Boycott or Australia opener Geoff Marsh, practising forward defensives in the mirror while naked, but I did cherish it.

The cliche about bad workmen blaming their tools does not always ring true in cricket. The elite player has his certainty and confidence to protect, and here one thinks of Raymond Illingworth's excuse for one dismissal – "Ruddy umpire must have given me t'wrong guard". But the average player does invest mystical qualities in his bat, as if, like King Arthur and Excalibur, finding the right one will make up for all his deficiencies in talent and technique.

But even the best are judged by the bats they choose. When Steve Waugh signed a lucrative deal with the Indian maker MRF, the South Australia quick, Paul Rofe, attempted to sledge him as he came to the wicket. "Let's get this Kashmir willow bat out of here boys," the bowler quipped. He should have known not to mess with the master of belligerent put-downs, who punctured the insult with, "Hey, Rofey, the contract for the Kashmir willow would buy your house." Hardly Wildean, but good enough to shut up Rofe.

As for my own willow wand, it was pinched from the shed, along with several other bits of wood, during the winter of the 1984 miners' strike. Whether it went on to have an afterlife in a more capable player's hands or ended up on a fire, as I have long suspected, it was undoubtedly put to better use than I ever made of it.